Here I was thinking Kurt Sutter would ignore the painfully obvious Chekhov's gun he introduced when Clay gifted his prized gun, handed down to him by his father, to Juice, the closest thing he has left to a son. I've never been happier to be dead wrong.
All in all, at least one good thing came of "The Dark... Whatever," that being Dexter finally accepting his Dark Passenger for what it really is, nothing more than an embodiment of his personal urge to kill. That being said, the manner in which this revelation came about was wonky.
How else can I describe the second-to-last episode of Sons of Anarchy's fifth season other than with a single word: happenstance. "Darthy" was obviously meant to be a murky episode for all the show's major players, Clay's being stripped of his patch causing the club to tear apart at the seams, but I know Sutter didn't intend for it to all play out in such a hard-to-swallow fashion.
Miami, as imagined by Dexter, is a city so writhing with the violent and the murderous that issuing a city-wide lock down to allow for them all to do away with one another sounds surprisingly sane.
Kurt Sutter's Sons of Anarchy is often an exercise in frustration, especially lately, and "To Thine Own Self" serves as the perfect example of every reason why that is.
Pictured above is one of only two moments I would venture to call a highlight in "Argentina," the second straight episode to fall flat on its face for me. It says a lot about the episode that I was reduced to ogling Jamie in her bikini in order to get some enjoyment out of the episode. While Dexter is nearing the home stretch of the season, it's doing so in a slow, limping fashion. Part of me wishes the network would take it out back to the shed and put it down, forgoing the eighth and final season that I can't see being any good at this rate, but I know there's no chance of that happening. So it looks like I have another season (plus these last four episodes) of let downs to anticipate.
Following this week's episode of Sons of Anarchy, I was left with more of a feeling of uncertainty than usual. Each member of the main cast has gone down a path with an end point that neither we nor them will know until they reach it.
"Chemistry" is what we're told that Dexter and Hannah have. He can't explain it himself, but it's there. Or so he tells us, his insatiable need to jump her bones attesting to that fact. Nothing he can do, say, or think will stop it from happening, it being the two of them having enough forced sexual tension to inch Dexter slowly into Twilight territory.
This week's episode of Sons of Anarchy was low on surprises with its major plot threads all going in their natural and expected directions. In the grand scheme of the season though, this was a necessary evil to set the stage for the final episodes, but it left viewers with what could be called little more than a transitional episode.
Harry, Dexter's adoptive father, may be long dead and now nothing more than a mental projection of Dexter's super-ego, but that doesn't stop me feeling sorry for him in "Do the Wrong Thing."
